lajoswinkler

Fetch!

It is possible. Asse wasn't a good solution, obviously. Long term storage is possible. Vitrification, sealing in drums, drums into concrete cyllinders, those in concrete casks filled with concrete, deep underground where there is no water. It can stay there for a LONG time and it won't enter biosphere even if it leaks, and it won't leak. Steel drums in a salt mine will leak. Obviously. But Asse had medium and low level waste, so they didn't bother with more protection. Politics is a *****. If you rely on politicians, you're in for a bad time. Instead, listen to engineers and scientists. There is no net benefit of such action. PV and wind can not create base load, and increasing coal consumption is a bad thing. Taxes must rise. It's that simple, really.

As phoenix_ca said, it's not a huge deal. It is possible, but it's not like RBMK. I don't think one rod would collapse the criticality. It can't be that sensitive. All I'm saying is that it's easier for CANDU to be used for proliferation than it would be with LWRs, not that is would be easy. Wow, master of trolling right there. You're referring to medium level waste. There's a lot more of it than high level waste, but it's much less radioactive. , and no, it's not a technological problem. It's a political problem, which means someone is a tight ******** and is making problems. Decision to halt civilian nuclear program was one of the worst decisions modern German government ever did. I hope someone will end this stupidity and start 3rd generation fission reactor program.

I'm not talking about extraction from spent fuel. CANDU's calandria refueling system enables you to put whatever you want inside while the thing is working. That way, you can get your matter of choice irradiated in the intense neutron flux. This is exactly how RBMK produced plutonium. Yes, there are more efficient ways to do it, but this is way more easier than messing with spent LWR fuel.

Problem with CANDU is that you don't want them in places like Iran because you can quickly make some tasty plutonium. Otherwise, it's a good design. Heavy water enables it to burn natural uranium, which is great. Chernobyl reactor (RBMK type) was also an online fueling type, and was designed with producing plutonium in mind. 78stonewobble, well said. Those aren't alternatives. Alternatives can be used to replace something. PV can't replace base load sources. That's why it's best to call those things renewables or addon sources.

Didn't you open a tornado thread last week? Why a new thread?

I wouldn't say middle button failure is rare. It happens all the time with my mice.

I forgot to comment on this. Yes, I would have zero problems with living above a final repository. It could not affect me in any way. You say no to storage? Then what do you want to do with it? Sprinkle it around? Why is that? It's quite cynical about kooks.

No, it's not just Fukushima. He's full of crap with lots of his futuristic ideas. And look, he even has a page on RationalWiki! http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Michio_Kaku Please, do read the article. It's backed up with references. A respected physicist wouldn't make such mistakes. He said the Chernobyl's core is still molten, and I remember his fear mongering when Fukushima happened. He had NO idea what kind of reactors are involved, and he joined the fearmongering train of BS. He was protesting against Cassini launch because of RTG power source. He's a theoretical physicist and a futurist, yet he's presenting himself as an authority on just about any natural science, and he's a sensationalist. Except some minor testing with dumping sealed waste into the oceanic trenches decades ago, what exactly happened with the waste? What bad management are you pointing to? High level waste isn't something you can dump like e-waste, hoping that no one will notice. It's incredibly radioactive and even minute leaks would eventually be registered somewhere. You can't hide it. We do have the technology to deal with the waste, but it is not an urgent thing. The spent rods can be recycled and used again as MOX, and breeder reactors can destroy a lot of the waste. It's simply not yet neccessary. Securing the rods is not expensive, and they don't rot. After few months of initial cooling, their heat output is low enough for them to be stored in dry casks. The idea that with power loss, they catch fire is true for freshly spent rods which are extremely radioactive. Decay heat output drops down fast. They can stay like this for hundreds of years if needed, and it's not like a thief will come and steal them. You can't steal a huge concrete block, and if you open it to steal the rods, you will die. Dude, comparing wind farms with nuclear reactors is just futile. As I've said, we don't live in Sim City.

Sure, make every road a thermal power station. That will boost the economy. In order for everyone to get their paychecks, we should print more money! Oh, wait!

Please, do tell me how would you use an active volcano. I'm dying to hear this. The amount of heat in the Atlantic ocean is enormous. By your logic, we should use that, too. Google "energy density" to see one of the problems with PVs. As I've said, there's basically not much left to use. Base load hydroelectric potential has been already used. Not every wind can be used. That narrows it down quite a lot. Biodiesel is a problem, you've described it properly. We can't rebuild forests. We can rebuild stacks of trees. Forest is a super-organism. Exactly. What does it mean tiny? Consider that a typical 700 MW nuclear power plant produces, in 40 years of power production, one full spent fuel pool of rods. Something like this. It sits in the pure water, cooling down. Most of the "waste" is uranium and plutonium which can be recycled. The remainder material, for which we don't have use today, can be vitrified and sealed into concrete casks in stable depositories underground where it will not be disturbed by anyone or anything for a long time, enough to decay to background levels. Unlike the rest of your talk, this is actually one of the things that are a problem with some companies, mainly bigass ones like AREVA. They don't really give much crap about the poor miners. It's not like better management would do significant harm to the industry. I don't use air conditioning. It's too expensive. I have a fan and I'm sweating like a pig. Wrong. The costs are calculated in. Nuclear power plants are projects which, unlike photovoltaics, consider total life cycle. That's exactly one of the reasons why they're so expensive to build. Loads of insurance and financial crap.

The temperature differential between the road surface and few milimetres below is miniscule. Unless you're planning to back every element with a deep aluminium heatsink, which would require insane amounts of this hard to produce metal.

Dude, the more you write, the more I see your lack of knowledge. Do you know how engines work? Or anything that uses energy? It's the movement of energy due to diferential. You need a heat sink for Peltier elements. If you stick it in an oven, you won't get a joule of energy even if you crank it to the maximum temperature.

I'll assume we're talking about the leftovers from recycling, when unfissioned fuel has been reclaimed and only the most concentrated waste is left over. Why is the waste bothering you? Its volume is relatively tiny, it does not present an immediate problem, unlike mountains of coal ash and lakes of chemical waste. You should know that building is very expensive, but running is very cheap. The fuel is cheap per kWh obtained. That's one of the key things about fission power plants. Great investment, crapload of cheap, stable base load energy. Nobody sane is against the reduction of energy consumption, but that alone is not the solution.

You could make enough friction if you increase the surface area of the glass, but that would lower the light transmittance and - the glass material would be depleted a lot faster. Glass simply isn't good for roads and that's where the whole idea hits the wall right in the start.

Michio Kaku is a sensationalist who, for the most part, speaks good stuff, but then spills some heavy crap. People buy it because they generally can't distinguish what's crap and what isn't. He showed his true face when Fukushima happened. He had absolutely no clue on what was going on, and immediately presented himself as the authority on the subject matter, which he is not. He's a theoretical physicist, not a nuclear engineer. So whatever he says about fission, I'd take with a huge bag of salt. We don't know if we can stop global warming. Saying we can is without scientific basis. We might slow it down, and the fact is that if we don't do anything, we're gonna have a bad time. If you plan to do anything about it using today's photovoltaics, you're going to mess up the biosphere a lot more than you think. Phovovoltaics are for certain areas on Earth where they can ease the peak loads, but only if they're applied rationally. They will not save energy crisis. Solar thermal has more hope, but has the same downsides. Wind helps intermediate load and requires backup. You've guessed it - gas power plants. Wind kite... what? LOL Hydroelectricity - most countries have already developed what could be developed. Additional development is for peak loads, not base load. Sea waves - will not save the crisis. Mostly LOL. Tidal power - helpful in a few spots around the globe. Will not save the crisis. Geothermal energy - just like tidal power. Thermal nuclear plants? You do realize that's fission you're against, and that it utilizes strong nuclear force?

No, time is as real as space. In fact, they're embedded one into another and they're relative for the observer, unlike the speed of light. Psychological experience of time, our awareness of its flow... that's something else. I think there are other species that are at least somewhat aware of it, mainly highly developed mammals.

It's all about the risk factor. Nothing in this life is without risk, but we have methods to lower it and, if something happens, to mitigate the worst. That's how the world works. I'm sorry to inform you that if you want to live a life without any risks, you can't. What you're forgetting is that Japan got struck by a disaster called tsunami+earhquake, and the death toll from that was 15885. Nobody died from nuclear accident and the accident itself was blown out of every proportion. The only reason it reached the same level on that disaster scale is because the scale is faulty. It way way less serious than Ukraine 1986. Using Fukushima and Chernobyl to spit on civilian fission power generation is completely futile. If you want to live like an Ewok, you're free to go. Just don't come back when you're cold, sick and hungry.

Some of you already know Squad has released their Kerbin Cup official mod. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/82931-Celebrate-the-Kerbin-Cup-with-Official-Mods-and-a-Community-Contest%21 Let's do some crazy things with it and post photos. One of the Kerbals has been subjected to oatmeal process and you can see him on the bottom, lying down. Then I've shot a small ball from a mainsail-powered cannon. It turned hypersonic in a fraction of second and burned up due to Deadly Reentry mod. Now you.

I think engines from Kosmos have the holes. I appreciate a good hole on an engine and dislike non-hole engines, but not enough to open a thread about it.

For the most part, no. I use Procedural Parts, so my rockets get all custom made, streamlined and efficient. I like it that way.

This little guy is insanely good as a rover. I've managed to cover several kilometres without doing anything. It just senses the tilted terrain and it goes straight to the coast. Unfortunatelly, he encountered some anomaly with Eve's terrain, and exploded, but until then, he was flipping his little feet like mad down the mountain.

thunderf00t did tackle that issue. Sapphire glass? USA would go bancrupt... The whole concept is so funny it hurts.

And the fact it would be scraped in the first few minutes, increasing the opacity and lowering the power output. Glass is not something that can be used for roadways, and that's where the whole discussion stops.

No, but I'd like this one to be enriched.